New forms
Changing artistic practices and the demands of modern audiences are
having a big impact on museum and gallery architecture, writes Simon
Stephens
With widespread budget cuts hitting the sector hard, it might seem logical that capital projects would take a hit, but in fact the number of new-builds and redevelopments shows no sign of tailing off.
Manchester is a good example of this growth. Earlier this year, the Whitworth unveiled its £15m redevelopment, which was carried out by Muma Architects. And on 1 May the city will have a new venue, the £25m Home, a multi-purpose centre developed to house a merger between Cornerhouse and the Library Theatre Company.
It was designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo and offers film, theatre and visual arts. And the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi) is raising funds for a £6m special exhibitions gallery for contemporary science (see p20).
The Treasury has promised £3.8m for the gallery and the Manchester museum recently received a £1.8m grant from the Wellcome Trust, meaning that 90% of the money has been raised.
But what is driving this building boom, and how are the demands of audiences and other factors, such as the need to create institutions that are both financially and environmentally sustainable, influencing the design of museums?
The design of a museum is an expression of its identity and a redevelopment can be a powerful way of reinvigorating an institution. This is because the transformation of an existing institution not only includes its physical appearance, but can also change how audiences view it and how it is managed and run. This is probably one of the key reasons why we will continue to see museum redevelopments continue apace.
The Whitworth is a good example of this. The redeveloped museum attracted 100,000 visitors in the six weeks after it opened in mid-February. The new spaces created by the revamp have allowed the 120-year-old institution to develop an ambitious exhibition programme and to house its material in an environmentally sustainable collections centre, with better public access.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is behind the UK’s most ambitious museum-building programmes, with its plans for new venues in Dundee and Stratford. It is also carrying out the biggest architectural intervention at its South Kensington home in the past 100 years, with the creation of a new courtyard, entrance and underground gallery, all planned to open in 2017.
AL_A won an international competition to design the £49.5m project in 2011, ahead of 110 other architectural practices that expressed an interest in the scheme. This is the same space that was earmarked for Daniel Libeskind’s Spiral, a £100m project that the museum pulled the plug on in 2004.
“We’re here 10 years after the Libeskind scheme, and the Bilbao effect has kind of done what it needed to do,” says Alice Dietsch, a director at AL_A. “I think people want something else from a museum now: they want a place where they can meet their friends and go and do things, and study if they are students. The courtyard we have designed does that better than a more bombastic approach to an architectural addition to a traditional museum.”
A major driver for the project was the desire to attract new audiences, with the idea that the new courtyard will create a more informal way of entering the museum. But Dietsch says discussions with the V&A have extended far beyond this.
“What we are very interested in with the project is how it changes the role of the museum. This has started an interesting and much broader discussion within the office and with people we work with at the V&A on why we have museums.”
Museums are constantly evolving in terms of their displays and the relationship with their audiences. But the pace of change has been particularly rapid over the past 10-20 years.
One of the major changes, although it is not completely new, is how museums have been moving into the territory of other cultural venues by offering other artforms. It is now common to see film, music and performing arts in museums and galleries.
This is having an impact on the way museums are designed as architects find ways to get different artforms to work together. This is all part of a wider trend for museums to become more participatory, informal and social spaces. Home in Manchester, with its gallery space, two theatres and five cinema screens, is one of the new breed of venues designed to offer different artforms under one roof.
Home has been created on a relatively small site in Manchester that is right next to a railway line. The architect Mecanoo has had to work hard to combine all the functions on such a limited footprint and to make sure that there is no noise from the nearby trains.
“It’s a really interesting mix of uses working incredibly hard together,” says Ernst ter Horst, an associate at Mecanoo. “The 500-seat theatre is in the middle and then it’s like a layer cake, with the galleries on the ground floor, studio theatre on the first floor and the cinemas on the second floor. It’s very simply arranged.”
Combining different artforms at one venue has obviously been done before, in places such as the Barbican in London.
There are also more recent examples, such as the newly completed Atkinson in Southport (see p48), designed by Levitt Bernstein, which combines a museum, art gallery, two theatres and a library. And Ipswich Borough Council is developing the town’s museum in a project by Rick Mather Architects that will combine arts, culture, science and heritage.
At Home, some of the programming will cross the different artforms. In a sense
this is just reflecting contemporary practices, with many artists working across
different media. So Home’s film programme will include a focus on artists such as Steve McQueen who have moved on to make trad-itional feature films.
The Tate Modern extension is a reflection of the changing nature of art, with many
of its spaces designed for the growing area of performance art. The project, due for completion next year, will also create more social spaces for visitors to relax.
The extension is being designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architectural practice that developed the existing Tate Modern building. This opened in 2000 and showed what could be achieved by creating what, at the time, seemed like an unusual and ambitious space – the Turbine Hall.
The hall has gone on to host some memorable artists’ interventions, including Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth and Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds. Projects such as these have helped give Tate a global reputation for displaying and interpreting contemporary art.
“The Turbine Hall suddenly made it possible to create art on a scale and with
a kind of power that was unimaginable before,” says Adam Zombory-Moldovan, a partner at ZMMA, which is working on the refurbishment of the V&A’s Europe 1600-1800 galleries.
“To an extent, it was a deeply unconventional gallery space, it’s utterly idiosyncratic. And it is the idiosyncrasy of a place, the fact that it’s not generic and typical, that is actually what makes it an interesting place to visit and experience things.”
Zombory-Moldovan says creating spaces that steer clear of blandness and have character and identity can apply as much to smaller projects as it does to larger schemes.
“Very small-scale interventions in places that show art can make an enormous difference to how you’re experiencing it,” he says. “And it can go from truly domestic-scale
settings right through to very big pieces, such as the Turbine Hall.”
Whatever the size of a project, environmental concerns are an important consideration for architects working on new-build museums and redevelopments of existing structures. Having greener buildings that use less energy is not only good for the environment, it also means smaller bills for the museum – which is becoming increasingly important as revenue budgets are tightened.
And the new economic realities that museums are operating within mean that museum architecture also has to reflect the fact that institutions need spaces that enable them to generate revenue through corporate events, catering and retail.
Stephen Anderson, an associate at Buttress Architects, points to his practice’s work on the redevelopment of the Great Western Warehouse at the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester (Mosi) as an example of the impact of commercial imperatives on the work of architects.
“Part of the brief there was very much to drive the revenue through the shop, the cafe, and through events, particularly corporate events,” Anderson says.
“So during the day the Revolution Manchester introductory gallery can operate very much as a visitor focus, but then, of an evening, Manchester United might host an event in there. The venue can change to do both of those things, quickly and successfully.”
Anderson says Buttress is also working on the redevelopment of Norton Priory Museum & Gardens in Cheshire, which has a £3.7m Heritage Lottery Fund grant, and where there are similar considerations in terms of commercial aims.
“It is a small, charitable trust, which is always going to be under pressure from a revenue point of view. So the emphasis is on maximising the benefits of a capital project to then minimise the revenue implications down the line, in terms of maintaining that building. So we keep the costs down, but make sure there are lots of ways to drive income – and the architecture has got to respond to that.”
The latest TrendsWatch report from the Center for the Future of Museums has some interesting examples of how the US is res-ponding to climate change and the threat posed by rising sea levels, flooding and extreme weather. These include the Chry-sler Museum of Art in Virginia, which last year devoted about $500,000 of its $24m redevelopment project to flood resilience.
The report says museums might want to “study long-term risk projects for their current site and make resilience a key factor during renovations and new construction”. It also says museums might want to choose sites with an eye on environmental projections and even spend less on construction, “knowing those structures may be abandoned in a relatively short timeframe”.
One answer might be the creation of temporary structures. There are already examples of this, notably the Serpentine Gallery’s in London, which has commissioned a temporary pavilion for the past 15 years. And in 2012 Tate Liverpool created a temporary structure on Albert Dock to show a project by US artist Doug Aitken.
This year, Turner Contemporary has worked with the Jasmin Vardimon Company on Maze (11-15 April), a performance that took place in a huge foam structure in Margate’s caves that was developed by designer and architect Ron Arad in collaboration with artist Guy Bar-Amotz.
Whatever the structure is, temporary or permanent, it looks likely that the public will continue to be attracted to exciting events held in impressive spaces.
“There’s been much consternation about the future of traditional museums – do we still need objects, and so on,” says Andrew McClellan, an American art history professor and the author of The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao.
“The jury is still out on those big issues, but it does seem clear that people are drawn to extraordinary spaces and experiences. Think of installations like the Rain Room at Moma [in New York] or events in the Tate’s Turbine Hall. As long as that is so seductive, museum architecture will remain a vital drawing card.”
A final article on museum architecture, looking at projects outside the UK, will appear in the September issue of Museums Journal
2015
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea
£5.2m
Powell Dobson
Home, Manchester
£25m Mecanoo
York Art Gallery
£8m
Simpson & Brown Architects
2016
Design Museum Kensington, London
£80m
John Pawson
Kelvin Hall
Glasgow
£60m
PagePark
Tate Modern, London
£215m
Herzog & de Meuron
Windermere Jetty: Museum of Boats, Steam and Stories, Cumbria
£13.4m
Carmody Groarke
2017
Aberdeen Art Gallery
£30m
Gareth Hoskins Architects
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
£10m
6a Architects
V&A Exhibition Road Project, London
£49.5m
AL_A
2018
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
£15.3m
Gareth Hoskins Architects
St Fagans National History Museum, Cardiff
£25.5m
Purcell
V&A Museum of Design Dundee
£80m
Kengo Kuma & Associates
2019
Burrell Collection, Glasgow
£66m
Architect to be appointed
Ipswich Museum
£14.8m
Rick Mather Architects
Manchester is a good example of this growth. Earlier this year, the Whitworth unveiled its £15m redevelopment, which was carried out by Muma Architects. And on 1 May the city will have a new venue, the £25m Home, a multi-purpose centre developed to house a merger between Cornerhouse and the Library Theatre Company.
It was designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo and offers film, theatre and visual arts. And the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi) is raising funds for a £6m special exhibitions gallery for contemporary science (see p20).
The Treasury has promised £3.8m for the gallery and the Manchester museum recently received a £1.8m grant from the Wellcome Trust, meaning that 90% of the money has been raised.
But what is driving this building boom, and how are the demands of audiences and other factors, such as the need to create institutions that are both financially and environmentally sustainable, influencing the design of museums?
The design of a museum is an expression of its identity and a redevelopment can be a powerful way of reinvigorating an institution. This is because the transformation of an existing institution not only includes its physical appearance, but can also change how audiences view it and how it is managed and run. This is probably one of the key reasons why we will continue to see museum redevelopments continue apace.
The Whitworth is a good example of this. The redeveloped museum attracted 100,000 visitors in the six weeks after it opened in mid-February. The new spaces created by the revamp have allowed the 120-year-old institution to develop an ambitious exhibition programme and to house its material in an environmentally sustainable collections centre, with better public access.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is behind the UK’s most ambitious museum-building programmes, with its plans for new venues in Dundee and Stratford. It is also carrying out the biggest architectural intervention at its South Kensington home in the past 100 years, with the creation of a new courtyard, entrance and underground gallery, all planned to open in 2017.
AL_A won an international competition to design the £49.5m project in 2011, ahead of 110 other architectural practices that expressed an interest in the scheme. This is the same space that was earmarked for Daniel Libeskind’s Spiral, a £100m project that the museum pulled the plug on in 2004.
“We’re here 10 years after the Libeskind scheme, and the Bilbao effect has kind of done what it needed to do,” says Alice Dietsch, a director at AL_A. “I think people want something else from a museum now: they want a place where they can meet their friends and go and do things, and study if they are students. The courtyard we have designed does that better than a more bombastic approach to an architectural addition to a traditional museum.”
A major driver for the project was the desire to attract new audiences, with the idea that the new courtyard will create a more informal way of entering the museum. But Dietsch says discussions with the V&A have extended far beyond this.
“What we are very interested in with the project is how it changes the role of the museum. This has started an interesting and much broader discussion within the office and with people we work with at the V&A on why we have museums.”
Museums are constantly evolving in terms of their displays and the relationship with their audiences. But the pace of change has been particularly rapid over the past 10-20 years.
One of the major changes, although it is not completely new, is how museums have been moving into the territory of other cultural venues by offering other artforms. It is now common to see film, music and performing arts in museums and galleries.
This is having an impact on the way museums are designed as architects find ways to get different artforms to work together. This is all part of a wider trend for museums to become more participatory, informal and social spaces. Home in Manchester, with its gallery space, two theatres and five cinema screens, is one of the new breed of venues designed to offer different artforms under one roof.
Home has been created on a relatively small site in Manchester that is right next to a railway line. The architect Mecanoo has had to work hard to combine all the functions on such a limited footprint and to make sure that there is no noise from the nearby trains.
“It’s a really interesting mix of uses working incredibly hard together,” says Ernst ter Horst, an associate at Mecanoo. “The 500-seat theatre is in the middle and then it’s like a layer cake, with the galleries on the ground floor, studio theatre on the first floor and the cinemas on the second floor. It’s very simply arranged.”
Combining different artforms at one venue has obviously been done before, in places such as the Barbican in London.
There are also more recent examples, such as the newly completed Atkinson in Southport (see p48), designed by Levitt Bernstein, which combines a museum, art gallery, two theatres and a library. And Ipswich Borough Council is developing the town’s museum in a project by Rick Mather Architects that will combine arts, culture, science and heritage.
At Home, some of the programming will cross the different artforms. In a sense
this is just reflecting contemporary practices, with many artists working across
different media. So Home’s film programme will include a focus on artists such as Steve McQueen who have moved on to make trad-itional feature films.
The Tate Modern extension is a reflection of the changing nature of art, with many
of its spaces designed for the growing area of performance art. The project, due for completion next year, will also create more social spaces for visitors to relax.
The extension is being designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architectural practice that developed the existing Tate Modern building. This opened in 2000 and showed what could be achieved by creating what, at the time, seemed like an unusual and ambitious space – the Turbine Hall.
The hall has gone on to host some memorable artists’ interventions, including Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth and Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds. Projects such as these have helped give Tate a global reputation for displaying and interpreting contemporary art.
“The Turbine Hall suddenly made it possible to create art on a scale and with
a kind of power that was unimaginable before,” says Adam Zombory-Moldovan, a partner at ZMMA, which is working on the refurbishment of the V&A’s Europe 1600-1800 galleries.
“To an extent, it was a deeply unconventional gallery space, it’s utterly idiosyncratic. And it is the idiosyncrasy of a place, the fact that it’s not generic and typical, that is actually what makes it an interesting place to visit and experience things.”
Zombory-Moldovan says creating spaces that steer clear of blandness and have character and identity can apply as much to smaller projects as it does to larger schemes.
“Very small-scale interventions in places that show art can make an enormous difference to how you’re experiencing it,” he says. “And it can go from truly domestic-scale
settings right through to very big pieces, such as the Turbine Hall.”
Whatever the size of a project, environmental concerns are an important consideration for architects working on new-build museums and redevelopments of existing structures. Having greener buildings that use less energy is not only good for the environment, it also means smaller bills for the museum – which is becoming increasingly important as revenue budgets are tightened.
And the new economic realities that museums are operating within mean that museum architecture also has to reflect the fact that institutions need spaces that enable them to generate revenue through corporate events, catering and retail.
Stephen Anderson, an associate at Buttress Architects, points to his practice’s work on the redevelopment of the Great Western Warehouse at the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester (Mosi) as an example of the impact of commercial imperatives on the work of architects.
“Part of the brief there was very much to drive the revenue through the shop, the cafe, and through events, particularly corporate events,” Anderson says.
“So during the day the Revolution Manchester introductory gallery can operate very much as a visitor focus, but then, of an evening, Manchester United might host an event in there. The venue can change to do both of those things, quickly and successfully.”
Anderson says Buttress is also working on the redevelopment of Norton Priory Museum & Gardens in Cheshire, which has a £3.7m Heritage Lottery Fund grant, and where there are similar considerations in terms of commercial aims.
“It is a small, charitable trust, which is always going to be under pressure from a revenue point of view. So the emphasis is on maximising the benefits of a capital project to then minimise the revenue implications down the line, in terms of maintaining that building. So we keep the costs down, but make sure there are lots of ways to drive income – and the architecture has got to respond to that.”
The latest TrendsWatch report from the Center for the Future of Museums has some interesting examples of how the US is res-ponding to climate change and the threat posed by rising sea levels, flooding and extreme weather. These include the Chry-sler Museum of Art in Virginia, which last year devoted about $500,000 of its $24m redevelopment project to flood resilience.
The report says museums might want to “study long-term risk projects for their current site and make resilience a key factor during renovations and new construction”. It also says museums might want to choose sites with an eye on environmental projections and even spend less on construction, “knowing those structures may be abandoned in a relatively short timeframe”.
One answer might be the creation of temporary structures. There are already examples of this, notably the Serpentine Gallery’s in London, which has commissioned a temporary pavilion for the past 15 years. And in 2012 Tate Liverpool created a temporary structure on Albert Dock to show a project by US artist Doug Aitken.
This year, Turner Contemporary has worked with the Jasmin Vardimon Company on Maze (11-15 April), a performance that took place in a huge foam structure in Margate’s caves that was developed by designer and architect Ron Arad in collaboration with artist Guy Bar-Amotz.
Whatever the structure is, temporary or permanent, it looks likely that the public will continue to be attracted to exciting events held in impressive spaces.
“There’s been much consternation about the future of traditional museums – do we still need objects, and so on,” says Andrew McClellan, an American art history professor and the author of The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao.
“The jury is still out on those big issues, but it does seem clear that people are drawn to extraordinary spaces and experiences. Think of installations like the Rain Room at Moma [in New York] or events in the Tate’s Turbine Hall. As long as that is so seductive, museum architecture will remain a vital drawing card.”
A final article on museum architecture, looking at projects outside the UK, will appear in the September issue of Museums Journal
Museums that are due to open
2015
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea
£5.2m
Powell Dobson
Home, Manchester
£25m Mecanoo
York Art Gallery
£8m
Simpson & Brown Architects
2016
Design Museum Kensington, London
£80m
John Pawson
Kelvin Hall
Glasgow
£60m
PagePark
Tate Modern, London
£215m
Herzog & de Meuron
Windermere Jetty: Museum of Boats, Steam and Stories, Cumbria
£13.4m
Carmody Groarke
2017
Aberdeen Art Gallery
£30m
Gareth Hoskins Architects
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
£10m
6a Architects
V&A Exhibition Road Project, London
£49.5m
AL_A
2018
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
£15.3m
Gareth Hoskins Architects
St Fagans National History Museum, Cardiff
£25.5m
Purcell
V&A Museum of Design Dundee
£80m
Kengo Kuma & Associates
2019
Burrell Collection, Glasgow
£66m
Architect to be appointed
Ipswich Museum
£14.8m
Rick Mather Architects